The new rules set down after World World II to prevent international aggression and atrocities — to ensure the peaceful settlement of disputes — failed to produce lasting justice in Palestine, where the U.N. General Assembly voted in 1947 to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arabs boycotted the partition plan, and it never went into effect.
After months of civil war, as the British colonial administration prepared to exit, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed an independent state of Israel in May 1948. War immediately ensued as several Arab armies from Egypt, Syria and elsewhere invaded. The new Jewish state survived, but hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were now refugees. More than 75 years later, the refugee camps still exist and Palestinian statehood is as distant a possibility as at any time since 1948.
In this episode of History As It Happens, University of Nottingham international law expert Victor Kattan discusses the reasons why the post-WWII rules-based order has failed to protect the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. The reasons can be found in Great Power politics as well in the very architecture of the United Nations itself.
“In 1945 you had different views of what international law was. The Palestinians articulated their right to national self-determination over all of the land of what was historic Palestine based on the fact that they were numerically preponderant and they owned most of the land. By the time we reach 1947, we have a major dispute between the indigenous Arab population and the Jewish community … and as a result, this led to conflict between the two communities as to who should be the rightful sovereign of Palestine,” Mr. Kattan said.
Palestinians have never recovered from the initial decision by their Arab neighbors to boycott the U.N. partition plan. And despite numerous U.N. resolutions over the decades criticizing the Israeli occupation of, and settlement construction in, the Palestinian territories since 1967, a two-state resolution has never materialized.
SEE ALSO: History As It Happens: 1948 and the Jewish-Arab conflict
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